


Ulysses

by melonbug



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: BDSM, Blowjobs, Deep Throating, Drugs mention, M/M, Mental Illness, Prostitution mention, Swallowing, dick choking, graphic depictions of dick sucking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-02
Packaged: 2018-09-12 22:33:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9093706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melonbug/pseuds/melonbug
Summary: John swallows noticeably, and oh, Sherlock can’t stop himself. He lets the Tesco bag fall from his hands, forgotten, and catches John by the shoulders, pulling him forward, kissing him. John’s entire body goes rigid, hesitant, and then he’s returning the kiss, sloppy and fervent.
And this isn’t the first time, though the times before they’d never spoken about, dancing around the subject like two men who casually fucked do, but this time feels different because Sherlock is on edge, is itching beneath his skin for some kind of fix and John is here and John is that fix, now.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this wayyyyy back when s1 first ended, but it's been sitting in my drafts 90% done for so long now, so I thought I'd get it finished and get it posted in honor of s4 airing :)

Today is a not good kind of day. Sherlock knows from the moment he wakes up, curled on the sofa, _his neck hurts, back hurts, the position is awkward and not at all a good one to be sleeping in, the clock says he’s slept all of three hours,_ that every thing about today will be wrong.

The smell of coffee assaults his senses _John didn’t sleep well, needs the coffee more than he wants his morning cup of tea_ and it is _wrong._ The sound of a cabinet closing too loudly follows, _John overslept, he’s in a hurry to get to work on time, he isn’t taking care to ensure he doesn’t wake him,_ and it is also wrong. Light filters in through parted lashes, faint through the curtain over the window, and it’s so very wrong.

Everything is wrong, and everything hurts and burns and itches in it’s wrongness and Sherlock drags in a breath and knows what kind of day it is.

He burrows further into the warmth of the sofa cushions, draws his dressing gown tighter around him, and tries to focus on the noises coming from the kitchen.

Liquid sloshing into a mug, the click of metal against glass as the coffee pot is put back, another slosh of liquid (milk being added to the mug,) a whisper of breath from John as he finally pauses in his rush to enjoy the first sip of coffee. Everything stills in that moment and an almost soothing calm falls over the flat.

And then Sherlock picks up the noise of traffic outside and the moment is ruined and the chaos is back. The wrong is back.

Footsteps signify John’s arrival into the sitting room, his approach to where Sherlock lays curled up tight on the sofa. There’s a hand on his shoulder, heavy and warm, and he can’t resist opening his eyes to look up at his jumper-clad flatmate. Friend. Best friend. 

What are they?

Sherlock doesn’t know. Doesn’t have a word for the warmth he feels just by being in this man’s presence. For a brief moment, that warmth helps block out the wrong. And then John sees him looking up at him and draws his hand away as if burned and that moment, too, is ruined.

“Sorry, did I wake you?”

_Yes._ “No.” His throat is dry, his voice hoarse and rough.

And wrong. His voice is wrong.

He wonders if John will notice.

He doesn’t.

“Well, I’m heading out,” he says, grabbing up his jacket and then snatching up his coffee, “Running late, so I didn’t make breakfast.”

Sherlock follows him with his eyes but doesn’t trust himself to say anything else. He nods, instead.

John pauses at the door and frowns at him. “Be sure to eat something, Sherlock, okay? I’ll probably be back late.” And then he’s out the door and Sherlock is alone.

He counts, slowly.

1, 2, 3-

John will probably be out of the building by now. Sherlock hears the door click closed downstairs.

7, 8, 9-

He’ll probably be hailing a cab, now. Unless he decides to take the tube. The tube costs less, but it takes longer, and John is in a hurry.

Cab it’ll be. And sure enough, Sherlock hears the sound of a car door slamming just outside the flat.

17, 18, 19-

If John has forgotten something, he will likely only return for it if he remembers within the next sixty seconds.

Sherlock keeps counting.

One minute passes, and then two, and now Sherlock is counting purely for the sake of counting. Just to try and shut down the white noise, the wrong, in his mind.

It doesn’t help.

Nothing much helps the wrongness.

He drags himself upright with some effort and contemplates his next move. He has a box of nicotine patches on the bookshelf. There are bottles of pills in the medicine cabinet- painkillers, sleep aids, that sort of thing.

And under a loose floorboard beneath his bed is a box with cocaine and morphine and needles.

Sherlock drags in a ragged breath and buries his fingers in his hair, tugging sharply. He can’t touch the drugs. That’s _The Rule._ The one rule.

Don’t touch the drugs.

He drops his hands down, reaches one over to caress the inside of his elbow. It’s littered with track marks, beneath the fabric of his dressing gown, and he drags his thumb across them, tracing from memory the path they create.

As if this will help. As if the brush of his fingers against them will reawaken the memories and with them bring it all back and make it better.

He heaves out an aggravated noise, drawing his hand away, and reaches for his phone where it lays discarded on the table. He could call Lestrade and ask for a case. Demand a case.

But no, that would hardly help, and he drops the phone back onto the table only seconds after picking it up.

He gets up, eventually, and his limbs feel like lead as he makes his way across the room and over to the bookshelf to snatch up his box of nicotine patches. He considers the box warily, does math in his head that is only familiar to him and him alone.

Three won’t do it, neither will four, and he draws the line at more than five.

Funny thing, lines. He has so many of them, lines and insignificant rules that count for nothing in the grand scheme of all that is wrong with him, and in fixing it, in setting things straight, in keeping things moving along in his head. _Don’t touch the drugs,_ and _No more than five patches,_ and _Not in front of John, never ever in front of John._ John mustn’t see the wrong. John, who looks at him with amazement and wonder and calls him brilliant and tells him he’s wonderful, is never allowed to see this.

He can barely stand to imagine what John would think of him like this, half coherent in his need for something, anything that isn’t wrong. Craving a needle against flesh and so many nicotine patches his head turns to fuzz and his vision blurs around the edges.

But John is gone, and the drugs are seeming like a better idea by the second.

He spins and slings the box in his hand across the room, heaving out an aggravated noise. And then he walks across the room and picks it up, gathers the patches haphazardly back into the box, for nothing else other than the sake of busying himself.

The action calms him slightly.

His eyes land on the knife stabbed into the mantle as he turns to drop the box on the desk and finally he feels some semblance of control over the situation. He plucks it out and brings it close to his face, looking at his fuzzy reflection in the blade.

It’s an old knife that’s not seen care in far too long, and Sherlock can’t even remember how he got it. Probably a gift of some sort for solving some crime or another. Something he’s deleted, no doubt.

He rolls up his sleeve and presses the flat of it to his pale forearm, enjoying the brief cool it leaves before his skin heats up the metal and the feeling dissipates. He draws it away then and drags his thumb over the edge carefully, testing the sharpness. The slightest bit of pressure yields the result he’s looking for and he raises his thumb to his lips to suck the blood off.

He casts it aside and goes to the violin, instead, sets his nerves alive with the noise of it.

He’s still playing when John comes home. His flatmate's heavy tread on the stairs alerts him to the man’s arrival even before he comes through the door.

Sherlock doesn’t stop his playing at John’s entrance, he doesn't even acknowledge him (and he should, because John is home and the clock on the wall tells him it’s only been two hours, ten minutes since the man left.)

He keeps his gaze fixed out the window, instead, and continues his melody; a rather unmelodious string of notes that fits his mood quite accurately, loud and wailing and mournful, and he supposes it must sound something like a dying cat to the neighbors. The thought makes him smirk slightly, but doesn't make him feel any less unpleasant.

He stops though when, after a few minutes, he doesn't hear John move or speak behind him.

"John," he says, turning to face him, to fix him with a bored stare.

John licks his lips, shifting the Tesco’s bag he’s holding from one hand to the other. “There was a schedule mix up at work,” he explains without prompting, “I have the day off after all.”

Sherlock studies him carefully- notes his odd posture, and the way his eyes dart carefully around the room as if searching for something out of the ordinary- and realizes, with more than a bit of annoyance, that John is lying.

No, on second thought- He’s not lying, but he’s definitely hiding something.

And Sherlock watches him closer, the slide of his tongue between chapped lips, the dilation of his pupils, the flush of his cheeks, despite the warmth of the morning. There’s a faint tremor in his leg, where he bounces it almost gently where he stands. And if Sherlock thinks to look for it, because he thinks to now, a slight bulge at the front of his pants.

Oh. Sherlock grins, despite how on edge he feels, because maybe this is what he needs, maybe this will set the day right again, and not wrong. He sets his violin aside, dropping it haphazardly across the sofa, wedging the bow between the couch cushions, and he steps over to John, plucking the tesco bag from his hand, making sure to graze across his knuckles gently with calloused fingers.

John swallows noticeably, and oh, Sherlock can’t stop himself. He lets the tesco bag fall from his hands, forgotten, and catches John by the shoulders, pulling him forward, kissing him. John’s entire body goes rigid, hesitant, and then he’s returning the kiss, sloppy and fervent.

And this isn’t the first time, though the times before they’d never spoken about, dancing around the subject like two men who casually fucked do, but this time feels different because Sherlock is on edge, is itching beneath his skin for some kind of fix and John is here and John is that fix, now.

Sometime later, Sherlock is kneeling on the floor before John, arms bound. Pain flares through his back with every twitch of movement, and he relishes the feel as he leans forward to take John’s cock in his mouth. The man shudders, his fingers twitching in the detective’s hair, and Sherlock presses himself forward and swallows John to the hilt with the ease born of years of practice. He ignores any protest from his gag reflex and sets a steady pace, sucking the cock down with little trouble. He’s far too good at this, he knows. He’s spent far too much time kneeling on the dirty ground of back alleys, in the past, doing exactly this. Only then, his arms had itched and burned with the desire for another fix, for the pleasant relief brought on by a needle breaching the skin there. And Sherlock knew the kind of things people wanted, and he knew how to give it to them in order to get what he wanted when he couldn’t get it any other way. And more often than not, that’s what it came down to- what he was willing to do, not how much money he was willing to pay (because he hadn’t the money, had spent it all already in order to sustain the same habit that sucking cock in back alleys was now paying for.)

In front of him, John let’s out a strangled noise and tightens his grip in Sherlock’s hair, and he finds he rather likes that a lot, would like it a good bit more, though, if he pulled instead of just timidly fisting and unfisting his hand in the dark curls. And John, he can tell, is struggling just as much not to thrust into the hot mouth around him, and Sherlock decides that, yes, he’d like it a great deal if he did that, as well.

He needs the control stripped from him, more than what handcuffs caught around his wrist can provide, more than the blade he’d danced with earlier, the drugs, hidden away, not to be touched. _Don’t touch the drugs, never._ And his skin is still abuzz, but this time with the feeling slipping away, finally, the wrongness dissipating little by little with every crude act John thrusts upon him, with every stutter thrust of John’s cock into his mouth.

He pulls back in one beautifully fluid motion, letting his tongue drag across the head just before it pops from his mouth, and looks up at John, who makes a positively wretched noise at being released.

“Really now, John,” he begins, making sure his warm breath ghosts across the member in front of him as he speaks, “I did say not to hold back.”

“I-” John swallows visibly, shuddering, “Yes, I know, but-”

“Do you not think I can take it?”

“I’m sure you can, I was just-”

Sherlock leans forward to swipe his tongue across the slit of John’s penis, causing the man to cut off with a moan, and then settles back onto his legs again. “I want you to fuck my face, John,” he says as matter-of-factly as he can and above him, John splutters.

“You want me to what?” he chokes out.

“Fuck my face.” Sherlock rolls his shoulder, feeling the tug of the handcuffs against his wrist and letting his eyes flutter closed at the wash of pain that rolls over his back with the motion. “I am quite capable of taking whatever you can dish out. You need not worry about gagging me, as I believe I have just demonstrated, and quite well, might I add, that my gag reflex is a non issue. I see no reason why you should hold back.”

John hesitates at his words, dragging his fingers through Sherlock’s hair. “I-” He licks his lips, twitching his fingers. “Yes, but still-”

“In fact,” Sherlock continues, interrupting him, “I would really, really like it if you didn’t. Hold back, I mean.”

“Oh, oh I think I get it now. This is a thing of yours?” Everything finally clicks into place in John’s pleasure addled mind. “This is a- A kink, right?”

Sherlock considers for a moment. “Yes.” He loves the idea of John using him, loves even more the knowledge that John will do this for him because Sherlock wants him to and not necessarily because he gets off on it as well. He knows that John would be just as satisfied by a more vanilla activity. “I believe so, yes.”

The fingers in his hair finally tighten their grip, pulling and all but dragging Sherlock forward again until John’s erection brushes his nose. “If this is what you want-”

“Yes, this is very much what I want, John.”

The man nods and then Sherlock surges forward to swallow his cock once more. It clicks as it hits the back of his throat but he keeps moving forward until his lips brush the patch of pubic hair at the base. There’s a sharp exhale above him and then John draws his hips back before snapping them forward again. He sets a steady pace like this, pulling at Sherlock’s hair to steady him and hold his head in place. And Sherlock, for his part, does his best to keep up, takes it all without complaint just as he said he could.

The force of each thrust jolts him, sends the muscles of his back rippling under the abused flesh there, and Sherlock groans around the cock in his mouth, the vibrations of the noise dragging a choked moan out of John. His movements are becoming more frantic and Sherlock finally finds himself struggling for air as John begins to drive into his mouth ruthlessly. It only adds to the buzz filling his mind, though, sends a rush of pleasure through him knowing he’s only just barely able to get a breathful of air every few thrusts. John could stop his hips now and Sherlock could choke, and he would enjoy every second of that, as well.

The hands curled into his hair are pulling so hard now he’s seeing spots, and Sherlock whimpers low in his throat, his own neglected cock twitching with painful desire.

By now, everything is a mess of saliva and heat and urgency and John’s thrusts are beginning to lack coordination of any kind, the careful rhythm he’d started now abandoned and forgotten in the cloud of his own lust. Sherlock’s name tumbles from his lips, again and again, alongside a slew of ‘fuck’s and ‘oh god’s, and, with one last stutter of his hips, John finishes, crying out in indiscernible noises as his orgasm washes over him.

Sherlock swallows him all, throat spasming and clenching and milking every last drop from the man in the process. When he finally lets the cock slip from his mouth, it’s to gasp for air amidst choking on the semen coating the back of his throat.

John is kneeling at his side before he can get his bearings. He’s still lightheaded, and he realizes, faintly, that he’s still seeing spots. He twists his arm, jerks it, and feels the pain ripple through his back as the action sends the muscles in his shoulder and back twitching and spasming. The spots only intensify, but the lightheadedness abates a little in the wake of the pain. It gives slight clarity to the situation, and he realizes John is swearing, telling him to sit still so he can unlock the handcuffs.

He wants to say ‘no,’ to tell him to leave the cuffs on, he’s fine, but his throat is raw and all he can manage is a hoarse grunt. The pain spikes briefly, quite suddenly, as his arms are finally released. They’re sore from holding the position so long and he’s vaguely aware of John rubbing them, massaging the joints and whispering something that he is certain is supposed to be comforting.

John doesn’t understand. John thinks he needs words of comfort, a gentle hand.

John doesn’t get it.

Sherlock chokes out a laugh, and it’s half hysterical and hurts his throat but he doesn’t let the discomfort of it stop it from bubbling forth. John is almost immediately pressing their foreheads together, murmuring something to him, his eyes squeezed closed and a pained look on his face.

Belatedly, Sherlock realizes he’s apologizing. The laughter dies in his throat and he catches John’s wrists.

“John?” His voice is worryingly rough and he clears his throat, dragging one of John’s wrists to his mouth to press a kiss against it. “Don’t be sorry, don’t—” He swallows, throat raw, body still heaving in slow, steady breaths. “I’m fine.”

And he isn’t fine, really, but he’s a little more fine for now, at the very least.

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on tumblr: cooltitsmelon.tumblr.com  
> I'm not really a Sherlock blog, atm, but that might change once I catch up on the show.


End file.
